Posts Tagged ‘indie’

Update: We didn’t make it but we’d like to thanks all the people who voted for Epistory. Next year you’ll do it!

Hi Folks,

It’s the 6th Annual Indie of the Year Awards, a celebration of this year finest indie games chosen by indies fans. If you could give us a hand and vote for Epistory on IndieDB it would be great. The top 100 will be announced on the 11th of December. Let’s do our best!

After fighting an insectile corruption and embracing the power of fire, we left our heroine and her companion at the edge of the Forgotten Forest. Along the treacherous, twisting paths of her adventure, she began to uncover the secret pieces of her story. Now she must fight not to drown under the crushing weight of uncertainty and fight with dignity to restore her inner peace.

Discover new enemies, learn new magic and explore two brand new dungeons full of mystery. Be brave; for there is no turning back on the way to the truth.

After a bug in our save system was found, we cannot guarantee compatibility between the update and the current (Halloween) version. Depending on where you last left the game it will work, or not. Regardless of the state of the save, we recommend a new game because of the work that has been done in the first two dungeons.

Please be aware that this update marks the end of our early bird pricing. Epistory now be fixed at $12.99 due to the major updates that have been done since launching on Early Access.

Thank you to everyone who has supported us on this adventure so far. We hope you will enjoy this new chapter and we can’t wait to hear your feedback!

As promised, Epistory – Typing Chronicles is now available on Linux and Mac! If you encounter any bugs please give us a heads up and we’ll fix them as soon as possible.

The challengers amongst you will be pleased to find the new “Arena” mode in the main menu. It’s a special place where the world will finally recognize the value of your typing skills. We’re still working on the leaderboard that should come soon. It’s also a bit rough around the edges.

Note that Spanish language has been added to the game. More languages to come during the Early Access.

Here’s the patch note for the new version:

New Features

Added: Infinite Battle “Arena” mode, where you’ll soon be able to challenge yourself and get your name at the top of the leaderboard.

Added: Linux version

Added: Mac version

Added: Spanish version

And plenty of stuff behind the scene for the upcoming Chapter 2…

Various improvements

Removed magic effect on enemies’ last word.

Special characters are displayed when the required magic is locked.

Reworked “Burning Hollow” level design.

Reworked story in “Forgotten Forest“.

Bug fix

Fixed: typing the word while it moves result in some letters not colored properly.

Fixed: avatar moving using the last letter of a word typed if the typing mode auto switch is triggered.

Fixed: auto typing mode switch was not happening if an untypeable (fire) word was displayed

Hi folks! We are so glad to announce the release of Epistory on Early Access. See you the 30thofSeptember on Steam. Meanwhile, you can visit the Steam page of Epistory and put it in your wish list: http://store.steampowered.com/app/398850

A paper on art direction

The “Art Direction” is basically a set of visual rules you decide to follow during all the creation process of your project. All the visuals you will design will stick to it, and in the end your project will end up coherent, with a specific look everyone will recognize.

“Paper” please

When Epistory was just in the shape of a playable prototype, we were just finishing a serious game on 1st world war. Despite the seriousness of the theme, the Art Direction of this project was really cute, showing flat scrapbooking characters and paper styled interfaces.

Our game about 1st world war. Notice the “scrapbooking” art style !

We really enjoyed making all the game assets with this look, but couldn’t push the style beyond the limits. Then Epistory came within our grasp: “A muse lost into a writer’s mind, creating the world as he imagine the story, fighting against the blank page fear” ? Hell yeah ! We immediately saw that we could continue with the paper style thing, but pushing it a lot further into a full 3D game !

Art “right” Direction

We first started to look for interesting references and we made moodboards with it.

Some of our “papercraft” styled references

We quickly noticed that the scrapbooking style couldn’t be enough. Despite the 2D movements of the avatar, we had to make full 3D environments, and relying only on 2D paper collages would appear flat and boring. We decided to go for a more “papercraft” approach, with some additional elements taken from the origami techniques.

First 3D test to see what we could do with those papercrafting/origami techniques. Once we defined the shapes, we worked on a basic colored layout.

Paper pot

After testing differents approaches we ended up with a mix of different paper techniques:

“Hot paper”

Once we had chosen the path of paper, all the assets had to stick with it, even special effects and particle systems ! We made “folded paper” styled textures, and used almost no alpha or additive techniques. It was complicated at first to find elemental paper styled effects to replace “classic video game effects”, but once we did the first ones we just had to stick to the technique.

Fire effect without using the classic additive method, only with plain opaque paper sheets !

“Crapbooking”

The major drawback of this Art Direction is that it is often difficult to create assets “looking like paper” but with a non realistic look. We wanted to keep things cartoonish, with strong shapes and colorfulenvironments, but when you have to make a style of paper you can find in real life, the risk is to end up with a great but too realistic asset. The difficulty is to make believable paper looking assets, but still looking cartoon… It’s an everyday fight to maintain consistency between the assets, butthe challenge is motivating and we believe the final visuals of the game will make it really unique !

More than 20 million players have enjoyed the Shift series of puzzle platformers on Flash, iPhone and Android. Tomorrow Fishing Cactus, Armor Games and Aksys Games are proud to see the Nintendo 3DS version of Shift, called Shifting World, hit the retail market.

You’ll find the game on the shelves in the US tomorrow (04-24), on the 26th in Japan (named Shifting World: “Shiro to Kuro no Meikyuu”! so cool!) (by Arc System Works) and finally in Europe around June?